compost

I'm a bit blank right now and couldn't come up with the puns for the title. I'm throwing this one open to the audience: pun me a title please. Compost related.

Firstly: how good is rain? Answer: very good indeed. The only damage recorded was the tarp under the fig tree didn't cope with the hundreds of litres of water it was trying to carry and it came down with a tidal wave of rotten figs and leaves. Easily cleaned up anyway. The fig production seems to be slowing down finally. I saw Maggie Beer pickling them the other day in their big salute to the fig episode on The Cook And The Chef. The overabundance I've had through the season has made me a bit spoiled and I'd just as soon not see another fig until next summer, but the fig and mozzarella plate she did looked pretty damn good.



The rain even made the soil look alright. It seems to hold together a bit without turning to clay or becoming sludgy mud, so maybe the dirt wasn't so bad afterall. Brunswick soils tend to be very heavy with clay - which is why there was a great big brickworks on Glenlyon Road. Cloudy gave me a helping hand last weekend turning a few bags of bought compost through and modifying the back shed to be a super compost station. You can see (especially after the rain) where the new compost enriched soil comes up darker and healthier.



Yesterday I took a drive to the country and collected 3 enormous bags of horse shit. It's fairly well dried because it didn't smell in the car at all on the way home. I'm building up the compost heap from scratch pretty quickly so the poo will be a good layer to speed it all up.

So here's the compost heap breakdown so far:


When I decided to turn the little falling down shed into a compost heap I obviously did it with my usual lack of forethought and planning. But now that I think about it, the floor of the shed was boards with a bit of a hollow below visible between the boards. Why would someone lay floorboards in a little old shed the size of a toilet? I've decided it was because the elderly Italian man who was here till his sons shipped him off to a care facility buried his fortune where thieves, and perhaps his evil sons, would never find it... under the shed! And therefore, under my compost heap. I do hope it's well wrapped.